


In the Warm Midsummer

by seeminglyincurablesentimentality (myinnerchildisbored)



Series: Rose Shelby vs. All the Bastards [17]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 03:30:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20269294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myinnerchildisbored/pseuds/seeminglyincurablesentimentality
Summary: It's sometime in the 1960s and an era is coming to an end.





	In the Warm Midsummer

**Author's Note:**

> This is something a little bit different and it may, admittedly, not be for everyone. Still, it was one of those bits that simply demanded to come out...anyway...I hope you enjoy (despite the fact that it is completely non-compliant, wildly fanciful and generally a bit odd).

The end was coming. It wasn’t in a rush by any means, it was taking its sweet time and no mistake.

Still, it was coming, it had to be; because this…this just wasn’t any way to be.

Rose leaned her head against the fridge door and took a deep breath, then another. So long as you were breathing, you could live through anything. She couldn’t remember who’d told her that, but it seemed true enough.

It was early, the sun was only just rearing it’s pale head over the roofs across the street, and for a moment the light and the emptiness of the street made Rose crane her head to look down towards the corner, half-expecting a horse-drawn cart to come into view, laden with milk bottles. Perhaps the world needed a few minutes each morning to remember how old it was; leaving a few moments during dawn in which the street looked as it had when Rose was a child. Then again, perhaps she was just fucking sentimental.

The coughing started up on the other side of the wall. Like a bloody seal was barking in the next room, calling for its morning rations of fish. A pissed off and impatient seal.

She no longer flinched when she went back in, it had taken nearly two weeks until she had been able to completely stop herself. What she still couldn’t stop was the barrage of adjectives that assaulted her when she looked at him. Broken. Ancient. Brittle. Decrepit. Fucking decrepit. Christ.

And yet he was still in there. Bits of him, anyway. You really wanted to be looking, but he was still fucking there.

Not all the time, not even half the time, but more than not at all. What little remained of her father was flickering, fizzing like a broken flashlight, in the rickety structure of skin and bones pretzled up on her bed.

Rose stopped in the doorway and watched for a moment as the coughing rocked her father’s foundations to the point of crumbling. It passed and he lay gasping, his mouth wide open and his eyes closed.

Then, slowly, very slowly, the left lid pried itself open one milimetre at a time. The whites were yellowed at the best of times, but the coughing left them so bloodshot they were practically fluorescent orange. It made the blue in the centre look unnatural, but no matter how bizarre the colour combination might have been, Rose noted a rare clarity.

“Morning,” she said.

Her father moved his dried, cracked lips but no sound made it through, safe a distressingly thick gurgle.

“It’s a bit early for that, don’t you think?”

Rose stepped into the room and walked over to the bed. Tommy’s eye, at halfmast now, zeroed in on her and Rose thought she could see something bright passing across it.

“Orright, orright,” she said. “No need to put the hard word on me, eh?”

She sat down on the side of the bed very gently and put her hand on the washed-out image of the rising sun on his chest. The skin was thin as paper, flaking and sore looking, but underneath it a heart was still stubbornly beating.

“What’ll it be today then?” Rose asked.

Her father emitted two long, low groans. Rose smiled at him and stood.

“Scotch or Irish?”

#

Since moving her father into her bedroom, Rose’s days were governed by what she termed the cycle of lucidity.

The mornings were slow, endless really.

They were a mush of coughs and twitches, interspersed with pitiful moans as she went through the ritual humiliation of wiping and creaming and wrapping her father into a state of relative comfort. It was a bit better now that she’d taken to giving him a drink before she started in on him, it seemed to take the edge off a bit. Still, more often than not they both needed another once they were finished.

Rose had heard people talk about this…this business of caring for the dying…and use words like “natural” and “peaceful” and even “serene” for fuck’s sake. There was nothing natural about this. It was fucked. There was nothing peaceful about starting your day reminding a man that he was nothing. That without someone there to wipe his boney arse, he’d be doomed to lie in his own shite until some fucker took mercy on him. That he was helpless and weak and would be until he couldn’t keep on breathing anymore.

To their credit, the nurses in the home had warned her; they’d flat out cautioned her against taking this on.

“It’s a lot, Missis Shelby,” they’d told her. “It’s a full-time job at the best of times and you’ve not got any help, do you? You’d be doing it all on your own. And, no offense now, but he’s a handful, Tommy.”

Rose had known he’d eat up her time and ruin her back and rob her sleep until the job was done.

She’d known Ruby would be none too pleased either, to put it mildly.

“He’s my father, too, you know,” she’d shouted over the phone. “I didn’t just chuck him into the first place that’d have him, Rose, I did my bloody homework – on my own, you might remember. There’s nothing you can do for him that they’re not better equipped to do, so don’t you dare, Rose, don’t you fucking dare get on a high horse about what is best for him now.”

And she was right, Ruby, of course she was. She’d chosen well and she’d not been stingy either, the bloody place charged an arm and a leg; a couple of knuckles of which, at least, were coming out of Ruby’s pocket. Which was more than Rose could lay claim to.

It wasn’t about that, though.

It wasn’t about Rose being worried that her father was being mistreated or left to writhe in lonely pain while the nurses had a cuppa and a biscuit. Nor was it about wanting to one-up her sister, about sweeping in on the final yards and painting herself as the dutiful daughter, weeping demurely by the bedside.

“You can’t just…” Rose had hear Ruby choke on her anger a little “…you can’t just waltz in like you’re the one who knows everything. Christ. You’ve not spoken in how long?”

It was true. But it wasn’t about that.

It wasn’t about anything Rose had or hadn’t done or Tommy hadn’t or had done at any time Ruby could remember.

It was about Rose’s memory of a man, who parted the crowds on the streets like Moses did the Red Sea just by the power of his name. Mothers pulling their playing children out of his path and men pulling the caps of their heads as he went past, whether he deigned to glance at them or not. It was about every soul in Small Heath and beyond – washerwomen, factory workers, drunks and coppers alike – breaking out in variations of “Good morning, Mister Shelby” when her father came into view.

Yes, Rose had not spoken to her father for the better part of a decade. Yes, they’d fought and raged against one another. And yes, she had at times wounded him deliberately. Yes, she’d only come to see him because Ruby had insisted, time and time again, that it would soon be too late.

But she simply could not leave him to die in a place where a twenty-something nurse fresh out of college had the gall to call him _Tommy._

#

They’d brought Tommy to Rose’s in an ambulance and carried him into her room, placed him on the bed and a sack of medications beside him, and assured her that it’d be days rather than weeks.

He’d been on the fucking bed for nearly a full month now.

Every morning Rose was sure it had to be the end of the line. There wasn’t a way that a body could spend the night roiling with terror and screaming itself mute, waking – if you could call it that – into this state of garbling impotence and still make it through another day. And yet, once she’d dripped the better part of his second measure of whiskey into him, injected something clear and strong into his meatless thigh and spooned a mix of crushed pills and oozy porridge past the stumps of his teeth; once he’d slept again, with the sunlight on him, his breathing so shallow he barely fogged up the mirror she held up to his mouth every five minutes, certain he was gone; when he woke for the second time in a day, speech would return. After a fashion.

He spoke then. Muffled by his swollen tongue and hindered by the way every breath whistled through him like the wind through a dilapidated shack, but still, he did speak.

Rose sat beside him, the bones of his hand rattling inside her own, and let him talk.

She went by many names these days. Ada, Polly, Ruby, Lizzie, Greta, Jessie…she’d become every woman of her own youth and further back in time still.

“No more, Missis Jurossi,” he croaked one rainy Wednesday. “They’ll think it’s me who’s having it…”

She watched him and listened and searched the slits of his eyes for recognition. She tried to conjure up the women he thought she was, so she wouldn't confuse him any further. She didn't mind, it was as though they were playing. A strange game, admittedly, but it passed the time nonetheless. She kept herself calm and still, hoping it would somehow make him follow suit. Some days she managed it, most days even. Some moments though, bloody hell, it was enough to make a grown woman run over with tears.

“Don’t cry…”

Rose lifted her head from the mattress near his hand and the stump of his left knee and found his eyes wide open and enormous. He was staring, his eyes on her face like tiny, damp hands.

“I’m sorry…” he whispered.

He was looking right at her, Rose was positive he could see, but there was something new now, something she’d not seen before. Not just lately, something entirely new. To her at least.

“I’m sorry…I am, mum, I really am…”

He was pleading, searching her face, his body buzzing like a basket of bees.

“I…I…”

“It’s orright.” Rose wiped her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to…”

“I know…” Gently, she moved her hand up, rested it on his head, on what little was left of his hair, and rubbed her fingertips against his scalp. “You’re orright, Tommy, I’m not mad. Not anymore.”

“I’ll do better-“ He was sobbing now, drowning himself, shaking with it like it was ripping him in two.

“There’s no need…” Rose cleared her throat and commanded her tears to stay in “…you’re a good boy, there’s no need to do better.”

Her father was disintegrating now. Wherever he was going there, wherever this fucker of drawn-out ending was taking him now, it made his nights dreaming of tunnels and corpses look like a fucking vacation. It seemed impossible that a body this dehydrated should be able to produce such an enormous amount of snot and tears.

“Come on,” Rose said in what she hoped was a firm and no-nonsense sort of voice. “You’re orright, lad, now stop your bawling, eh? No bawlin’ allowed.”

It was wracking him, turning him into a puddle. It was too much, she had to stop it or he’d leave now, begging forgiveness from his mother.

“Thomas.” Rose took her hand off his head and took hold of his arms, her hands going round the ghosts of his biceps as easily as they might have spanned a child’s wrist. “Enough now, or I’ll give you something to cry about. D’you hear me?”

Her father stiffened, as much as he could…or more so than usual, Rose didn’t bloody know anymore. But he did stop crying. She could nearly watch him suck the tears back into himself by some insane, innate force of will. A reflex, a depressing childhood reflex of self-preservation had come and taken over. Rose held her breath and watched her father still and go to sleep.

He called her Duchess, he called her Mae, he called her names she vaguely connected with old Small Heath families, he called her all the Lees under the sun; in fact there were only two things he didn’t call her. He didn’t call her Grace and he never, not once, called her Rose.

You had to take the good with the bad, Rose supposed.

#

As weird as they got – and they got rather fucking weird at times – the hours when her father had a voice to put to his wild journey through space and time were the best part of their day.

It made him very tired, the talking, but sleep rarely came. Instead, he would begin the slow descend back into the tunnels.

There were things amongst his medicines that were no different from the tar he’d been smoking when Rose was a small girl; but either the doses she’d been instructed to give him were too low or the walls between the now and the way-back-then had become so corroded there was no chance they’d keep the demons at bay.

As the memories of women faded into the afternoon, the deep would rise from its hiding place and swallow her father bit by bit. By the time her neighbours’ children came in for their afternoon tea, Tommy would start shouting. His eyes would lock out the room as he yelled for Freddie and Danny and reinforcements and his brothers and, on particularly bad days, Rose’s brother.

Around about dinner time, his voice would go and then, for the remainder of the long summer light and all through the night, there they’d be – Rose and her father – periods apart but in it together nonetheless.

“They’re not goin’ to get you,” Rose whispered, over and over and over into the shell of her father’s ear as he struggled from one endless minute to the next. “They didn’t get you. You’re an old man and this shite is long, long gone…”

She’d fall asleep, eventually, she always did; once his fighting became silent. Rose slept in a chair with her head on the bed and woke with stiff joints and stabbing pains in her neck. She’d go out and make a cup of tea and wait for the coughing to start.

#

Ruby rang from London.

“How-“

“Don’t worry,” Rose interrupted. “You’ll be the first to know.”

“I didn’t-“

“When he’s gone,” Rose said, watching her motionless father through the open door, “I’ll close his eyes and I go to the phone.”

She could hear her sister breathing on the other side, over the noise of the office around her.

“Is it very bad?” Ruby asked finally.

“It’s orright,” Rose said after a while.

“Liar.” Rose thought she could hear her sister sucking back a sob. “Why won’t he go, Rosie?”

Ruby, in the years leading up to this state of affairs, had done much reading and consulting with professionals on the business of dying. It had left her believing that death would not come until peace of mind had been achieved. Rose, during their final conversation on this topic, had pointed out the many, many people they knew, who had died screaming and raging and begging for mercy; but Ruby insisted that this type of dying, the kind old people did, was different.

“I s’pose he’s not finished,” Rose said softly.

“He’s never fuckin’ finished.” The sounds of home crept back into Ruby’s voice and Rose snorted a laugh.

“Fair enough,” she said.

“Maybe he’s waiting for the bleak midwinter,” Ruby said drily.

“Good fuck,” Rose giggled desperately. “It’s only August, don’t say that.”

“Rosie?”

“Yea?”

“Are you orright?”

“I think so,” Rose said. “I’m pretty sure, I am.”

#

“Fuck this.”

Rose stopped swabbing the open sore festering in the crook of Tommy’s remaining knee, uncertain whether she’d heard right. Very carefully she turned her head and searched her father’s face. His eyes were closed and sticky looking.

“ ‘d you say something?” she asked.

“Yea.”

He sounded so much like she remembered it terrified her.

“What was it?”

“Fuck this.”

Rose sat up and stared at him. His lips were barely moving, it seemed impossible that they should produce any sound at all. She had to be fucking losing her marbles now, hallucinating from lack of sleep. Letting wishful thinking leak into the day.

“Take me out.”

If he’d at least had the good grace to open his eyes, for fuck’s sake.

“And go to prison for knocking you off when you’re nearly there now?” Rose heard herself say. “I’ll do no such thing, thank you very much.”

“No.”

“Too bloody right. No.” Rose looked down and found herself holding onto his hand much too tightly. She could feel his bones grinding beneath the skin. “Asking me to become a murderer…fuck. Pull the other one.”

“No.” He was turning his head, bloody hell, that was a new one. “Outside.”

“Eh?”

“Out-“ it was taking all he had, she could tell, “-side.”

“You want to go outside?”

“Yea,” he breathed it rather than said it.

“I-“

“Please, Rosie.”

Ah, fuck.

“Well.” Rose sat down heavily on the chair beside the bed, her entire body trembling with the strangeness of it all. “I s’pose if you’re well enough to interrupt me, you’re well enough to go outside.”

#

It was, to say the very least, a fucking operation.

To start with, there was no way he’d be able to sit in the car, that was simply not happening. It was a bit of good luck that Helen’s fella, the one she’d married after she’d tossed the useless bastard out on his ear, was a painter by trade, who had a van and a heart that would not allow him to deny help when help was needed.

Rose filled the back of the van with every blanket, sheet and cushion her flat contained. She packed a picnic of pain pills and whiskey. Then, as she waited for the sun to go down and the neighbours to go to bed, she set upon the task of getting her father dressed.

“You want to go out,” she said over his grunts and yelps of protest at the unfamiliar feel of real clothes on him. “I can’t very well take you out wrapped in a sheet, can I? We’re nearly done, orright, we’re nearly done.”

She couldn’t be sure he knew what was happening. He’d not spoken to her, not like _that_, since he’d asked her to take him outside. Truth be told, Rose was fairly confident he couldn’t even remember he had asked. But if he did, if there was even one shred of him that remembered…he was fucking going out and that was it.

Rose pinned the empty trouser leg out of the way, buttoned him into a shirt and jacket. The bruises on his back, from lying down for so long, were enough to make her want to cry. She was hurting him, there was no question about it, he was in fucking agony, but she didn’t stop until his foot had a sock and shoe on it and the house around them was dark and quiet.

Of course, Rose had lifted her father before. She had moved him around the bed to change the sheets, to keep him clean, to get him somewhat upright so he could take a drink. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. He didn’t weigh very much anymore, her father, but he was a stiff and awkward cargo and, of course, there was a bit of a difference between rolling a man onto his side and piggybacking him down two flights of stairs.

She nearly stacked it on the landing of the first floor. That’d have been right. The neighbours running out into the stairwell to see what was going on and there’d be Missis Shelby throwing her half-dead, ancient father about. That’d have just been outstanding, wouldn’t it. Rose stayed on her feet by sheer force of will and carried on, her father resting on her back like a sack of…who the fuck knew…a sack of something that couldn’t hang on and was slipping all over the place.

Marbles. Perhaps that was it.

She got him down and into the nest in the back of the van without anyone crossing their path. As she stuffed the pillows around him, to keep him from rolling when she went round corners, her father croaked something that sounded suspiciously deliberate.

“Come again?” Rose asked, still a little out of breath.

“Egg.”

“I’m not going back upstairs to get you fucking eggs now, dad.”

“ ‘m ‘n’ egg.”

It was as if the van had been struck by lightning.

“You’re an egg?”

There was the faintest suggestion of a smile in the half-visible corner of her father’s mouth.

“I’ll drive carefully then, eh?” Rose said, tears already streaming down her face.

She closed the door, leaned her head against it, stuffed her sleeve into her mouth and howled.

#

There’d been a time when you could drive out of town and be in the country instantly. Roads would disappear and hills would start to roll and before you knew it you’d be up a hill somewhere, overlooking nothing but grass and trees, miles from any people. Now, you’d wanted to really know the lay of the land to get a minute to yourself.

Rose drove the van up the hillside at painfully slow speed. She was certain her father was crumpled against the back door already, folded in half and broken to bits. He wasn’t making any noise, though, so if something was amiss, she was fairly sure it’d be too late to do anything about it.

At the top she turned the van around, performing an awkward seventeen-point turn until the back end faced the valley.

“Are you orright back there?” she called through the tiny window separating the cabin from the cargo hold.

Nothing.

Rose got out, walked around and opened the door. Her father was right where she’d wedged him, bundled up and seemingly sound asleep. It was just as well, Rose figured, the sun wouldn’t be coming up for another half-hour. She sat on the edge of the van’s open back and lit a cigarette.

The black mountain was looming far away on the other side of the valley, huge and ominous like the future itself.

She’d spent a lot of time imagining how her father might die, too much time, especially when she’d been much younger; but the idea that she’d have him up in the hills in the back of a painters’ van had never crossed her mind. Until very recently, she’d not considered the possibility of herself being anywhere near him, when it got down to the business of dying proper. It made Rose feel a little bit as though she’d invited herself to someone else’s party.

There was a groan behind her.

“Hang on…”

Rose clambered into the van and started moving cushions around, turning the nest into a throne and the egg into a crumpled king, looking out over his blue-tinged kingdom. Not that he could see anything with his eyes stuck together.

Rose spat on her finger and started to clear away the yellow cement keeping her father in the dark. He jerked and growled.

“You think this is disgusting, you should see it from my end,” Rose said, scratching globs of foulness and eyelashes away as gently as she could. “It can’t be worse than getting shot, can it?”

Her father stilled and, finally, opened his eyes. The sun was rising, just, the smallest halo of it coming over the black mountain, tinting sheets of rain in the distance a weak shade of yellow and pink.

“How’s that for outside?” Rose asked quietly.

They sat and watched the sun rise.

After a while, a long while, when the sun had cleared the black mountain and they could see specks of cows on the pasture down below, Rose retrieved the whiskey. Her father coughed so hard at the first sip, she thought he’d be gone then and there; but the second and third went down easily. Rose watched him watch the world before him, his eyes as open as they’d ever been.

It was an age until he started to moan and claw at his shirt. She opened the top buttons and went in search of the morphine shot, but when she made to pull his pants up to give it to him, he shook his head violently.

“Sure now?” Rose asked. “You look like you could do with it.”

“No.”

“Orright.”

Rose climbed further into the van and settled down next to her father, taking his hand in hers, looking out, waiting. Tremors ran through him like earthquakes.

“Rosie.”

“Yea. I’m here.”

“A story.”

Good fuck, how could he expect her to be able to speak when he did things like that? Rose laid her head back against the wall of the van and waited for the first wave of weeping to pass before she cleared her throat.

“Once upon a time-“ it was as good a way to start as any “- there was a man, who made a hash of everything. He loved the wrong people and messed with the wrong people and he picked fights with dogs much bigger than himself.”

Her father’s head slid sideways until it rested on her shoulder. Rose slid her free hand onto his belly and felt it moving up and down almost imperceptibly.

“He thought he was all alone, that wild and silly man. But then, one morning when it was nearly too late to feel anything, he woke up and his body was alive with the pounding of a dozen hearts. You know why?”

Her father wheezed and his head grew heavier, like a cannonball weighing them both down. 

“Because even though he’d made himself a tower, without a single window or a door, they’d crept into him anyways, like ghosts. His brothers and his children and everyone who’d ever loved him, and put their hearts inside him when he wasn’t looking.”

He was working hard now, every bit of him humming with the effort of staying alive.

“They took up all the room, the hearts did,” Rose went on shakily. “Until there wasn’t any room for anything else. Not for a memory, not for a fear, not even for the tiniest bit of regret. They just grew and grew and beat and beat until the tower crumbled down and the man just flew away on the wind.”

There was nothing. No final rattle or explosion or even a sigh. Just nothing.

Rose closed her eyes and felt the sun heating up the van. There was a phone booth just before the main road. She’d stop there and give Ruby a ring…in a minute.

  



End file.
